The News

Before Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn, New York, partake in a sacrificial ritual called Kaporos. During Kaporos, practitioners swing a live chicken around their heads while saying a prayer to transfer their sins to the animal, who is then slaughtered. In 2016, hundreds of animal rights activists disrupted the massacre.

Slaughtering animals on public streets is illegal, as it violates 15 city and state health, sanitation and animal cruelty laws, but NYC’s elected officials and the agencies that report to them, including the NYPD and Department of Health, turn a blind eye because the ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities that partake in the ritual vote in blocs. NY-based attorney Nora Constance Marino is suing the City of New York on behalf of local residents and the advocacy group The Alliance to End Chickens as Kaporos for failing to enforce both city and state laws.

Shimon Shuchat, who was born into the Hasidic community but has since left, encourages a Kaporos practitioner to swing coins instead of live chickens.

Animal rights activists in New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Jerusalem, cities with large populations of ultra-Orthodox Jews, are campaigning to ban Kaporos.

You may also like:

Comments via Facebook

TheirTurn.net Comments

The shameless cruelty and evil done in the name of religious piety and tradition. When will people of all ‘religious faiths’ realize that compassion toward all living creatures is the basis of all morality. The notion that we can or should transfer our sins onto any other being is itself a foolish and irresponsible idea. No living being, especially not so innocent a one (like a chicken or other animal) or another person, can absorb our sins and misdeeds. And the irony, to expect this while committing an act of cruelty. This is the very kind of thing that gives religion a bad name.

Historic practises like the slaughter of warm blooded creatures should remain just that . IN HISTORY BOOKS . This is 2016 and there is no place for this carnage. It is so cruel and I believe the Jewish people are aware more than anyone what cruelty is, considering what they have
Had to undergo in Modern history. Please change these customs

The absolute absurdity of passing your sins along to another living being, chickens in this case, defies all credulity and rationale thinking and is nowhere mandated in modern interpretations of religious texts! Enlightened and more compassionate Jews, who wish to make a symbolic “sacrifice” in order to atone for their sins, do so by making a charitable donation of money that they have worked for or earned. The same is done among enlightened Moslems, who unlike their backward brethern, slaughter and sacrifice millions of innocent animals for the festival of Eid.

Animal sacrifice, like human sacrifice, is an archaic and obscene ritual that belongs in the dustbin of history! In the 21st century, there is no place for such ignorance and defiance of reason and the law, when we know full well that chickens, like every other sentient being, can experience pain and suffering.

As a Jew who is aware of our history and the centuries during which Jews have been singled out and persecuted for imagined and concocted “crimes” and “evil” deeds, these backward, unenlightened “jews”, lend credence to the very image that has fostered prejudice, intolerance and hatred, and bring shame and disgrace to everyone who calls him/herself a Jew, or anyone with a modicum of compassion and a sense of morality.

It’s time for this backward enclave, isolated from reality and the modern world, to evolve, accept responsibility for their own “sins” and let other creatures live free from the very torture and disdain they heap on these innocent victims, as they abuse them, needlessly slaughter them and without a thought to the lives they have taken, toss them into piles of garbage.